Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Ashoori Returning to UK as Britain Settles $530M Debt to Tehran

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national who has been detained in Iran for nearly six years, has left Tehran's airport after being freed with another fellow detainee, Anoosheh Ashoori, British officials said Wednesday.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, on a trip to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, tweeted that he was pleased that the two's "unfair detention" had ended.

"The UK has worked intensively to secure their release and I am delighted they will be reunited with their families and loved ones," he wrote. He said the two would return to the UK.

An Oman Royal Air Force jet left Iran just moments before lawmaker Tulip Siddiq, who represents Zaghari Ratcliffe, tweeted that they were in the air.

An image showed Zaghari-Ratcliffe inside a similar aircraft. The semiofficial Tasnim news agency also posted a video online of a woman it said was Zaghari-Ratcliffe getting onto a similar aircraft.

Ashoori was detained in Tehran in August 2017. He had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for alleged ties to the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency, something long denied by his supporters and family.

A lawyer representing Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Tehran couldn't be immediately reached for comment.

Johnson had confirmed earlier that a negotiating team was at work in Tehran to free Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe served five years in prison. She was later convicted of plotting the overthrow of Iran's government, a charge that she, her supporters and rights groups deny. She had been held under house arrest and unable to leave the country since her release from prison.

While employed at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency, she was taken into custody at Tehran's airport in April 2016 as she was returning home to Britain after visiting family.

Rights groups accuse Iran of holding dual-nationals as bargaining chips for money or influence in negotiations with the West, something Tehran denies. Iran doesn't recognize dual nationalities, so detainees like Zaghari-Ratcliffe can't receive consular assistance. A U.N. panel has criticized what it describes as "an emerging pattern involving the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of dual nationals" in Iran.

Iranian state media said that Britain had "settled a long-overdue debt of $530 million to Tehran." Iran's English-language broadcaster Press TV made the announcement as Zaghari-Ratcliffe was allowed to travel to the airport with British officials.

Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency earlier suggested she'd be released after the British government paid Iran the sum. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the late Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi paid the sum of 400 million British pounds for Chieftain tanks that were never delivered.